United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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16 VOX (3) From the nineteenth century I should invoke Ruskin or C arlyle or Arnold: ( Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery”), a flash from a letter of Huxley’s, a bit from poor Clough. But instead I name and quote Wordsworth; Wordsworth in a particularly pontifical and petulant mood if you like, but Wordsworth telling the story of the world. A multitude of causes,” he says, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident. . . .When I think upon this degrading thirst after out¬ rageous stimulation, . . But I need not read on. You see my point. This “prematurely afflicted century” is just what all the centuries have been to the sensitive. And hence I may pass to my next topic, The Challenge of the Tragic, without too much worry over a definition. The word tragedy is admit¬ tedly difficult to define. It is like socialism or culture or the state of being drunk; you have the most amazing and unforseen complications on your hands the moment you desire precise finality of definition. Yet we pos¬ sess working meanings for these terms. I think the idea of waste seems persistent in our thought concerning the nature of the tragic fact; waste implying misdirection, confusion; disorder rather than order; if you go deeper, waste, seeming to imply lack of direction of any sort, an absence of that witting and loving control by a Providence, a Scheme of Things, or a God, by the assumption of which we normally comfort ourselves. However we may define the nature of the tragic element in human life, whether Aeschylus or Shakespeare or Ibsen or the New Testament may help us most in definition, the thing is there. I think in taking up its challenge we come upon sure steps towards the achievement of cul¬ ture. “Commonplace people,” says Masefield, “dislike tragedy because they dare not suffer and cannot exult.” Culture, as applie d to humanity, if we rescue the word from its sillier uses and even perhaps from Mr. Arnold, means the achievement of the highest quality possible in terms of the human element on the earth. To face the tragic—I mean by the tragic now, the total weight and implications of the anomalies, the in¬ scrutable black accidents, on the one hand, and the “moral offensive¬ ness” of the established order of our world on the other—to face the brutality, the absurdity, the waste of it all—I mean by facing it, really seeing it, accepting it—to face the tragic thus, and to go on facing it, is to learn the profoundest things that may be learned about the essential nature of the best in man. “Pour on. I will endure.” cries Lear, and for

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vox 15 Lord Chesterfield’s four thousand years and whatever may, or s hould be added thereto. Out of scores of available quotations, three will suffice to suggest a deflation of that eloquence which begins “There never was a time in the history of the world. . .” (1) In 115 or thereabouts one Juvenal found himself face to face with a complicating factor in the life of man perennial since man first tried to make a garden of the world. Juvenal tackled the woman problem. I cannot give you all he says in the sixth Satire but it is easy to give you enough to suggest that any risks we run to-day from having women in the world have always been run. Apparently, women have always been at least half of what is the matter with the world. Says Juvenal: “Why need I tell of the purple wraps and the wrestling oils used by the women? Who has not seen one of them smiting a stump, piercing it through and through with a foil, lunging at it with a shield, and going through all the proper motions? . . . What mod¬ esty can you expect in a woman who wears a helmet, abjures her own sex, and delights in feats of strength? . . . Yet these women are the women who find the thinnest of thin robes too hot for them: whose delicate flesh is chafed by the finest of silk tissue. . . What decency does Venus observe when she, is drunken? When she knows not one member from another, and eats giant oysters at midnight. . .drinks out of perfume bowls, while the roof spins dizzily round, the table dances and every light shows double! There is nothing that a woman will not permit herself to do, nothing that she deems shameful, when she encircles her neck with green emeralds and fastens huge pearls to her elongated ears.” Juvenal even faced the educated woman: “She lays down definitions, and discourses on morals, like a philosopher. . .The grammarians make way before her; the rhe¬ toricians give in; the whole crowd is silenced.’’ I do not quote these things to show what is the matter,with wo¬ man, but simply to show that our unsolved problem of the relations of the sexes, that fundamental warfare between the sexes which faces us everywhere beneath the surface of life today, is a very old affair. (2) My next author I shall not name. He lived in the eighteenth century and was something of an anomaly in that comfortable upper class century; he was a tragic figure. So tender was his spirit and so 1am- bently and brilliantly sane was the vision of his mind that we still de¬ fend ourselves and the vested interests of our comfortable insanities against him by calling him mad. A single quotation from him will also suggest the perennial story of the world. “But when a creature pretending to reason could be capable of such enormities, he dreaded lest the corruption of that faculty might be worse than brutality itself. He seemed, therefore, confident that instead of reason we were only possessed of some quality fitted to increase our natural vices.” G. G. Ramsay’s translation.

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vox 17 a moment the old man is magnificent. No more do we fear for him; no longer do we pity him. He is great. It is a truism, is it not, that the greatest tragedy in art, bringing - us most crucially front up to the greatest tragedy in life, brings us also nearest to a conception of the virtue and dignity within man. After hav¬ ing been wrought upon by a great tragic work in art, we walk the streets or merely lean and gaze over a gate, caught up for a while into great¬ ness, fused into the beauty and strength of the human factor upon this earth, the apocalypse of man’s sublimity and solidarity in face of what¬ ever is the Universe for a while before our vision. Rhetoric again? Rhe¬ toric only to those who have not glimpsed the experience. Such exper¬ ience, drawing out and disciplining man’s ultimate powers, carries the secret of his finest culture. And such experience should surely suggest the grounds of faith. Faith is come at hardly by the sensitive and the thoughful. That is why in its cheaper forms it is so common among commonplace people. Per¬ haps the deepest tragedy of all we have to face in life is just herein: that this acceptance of the challenge of the tragic fact and the consequent inner extension and enrichment of life is hard to come at and seemingly as yet come at only by the few. There are so few cultured people, people who know where to be tolerant and where to be magnificently intoler¬ ant, people who are wise without bitterness, and tender without soft¬ ness, people who persuade us that they know what is in man. Yet I venture a paradox at the end. Tragedy, even this last and darkest trag¬ edy, is the great breeder of faith in man, if man faces it. As to faith in God as well? I think Shakespeare was facing that question in Hamlet and Lear at least of the tragedies. The Man of Gali¬ lee faced it in Gethsemane and “My God, my God, why hast Thou for¬ saken me?” was the voice of humanity crying for its faith. Be very sure of this at any rate. You will never win to an adequate faith in God without an adequate facing of the tragic in human life. May I remind you of my funny little topics? Our Prematurely Afflicted Century, The Story of the World, The Challenge of the Tragic, The Achievement of Culture, and The Basis of Faith. Grant B.: It’s to be a battle of wits. Alice C.: How brave of you, Grant, to go unarmed. Pat S.: Wipe off your chin. Laur. S.: Can’t It’s fastened on. Waiter: Are you Hungary? Harold S.: Yes, Siam. Waiter: Den Russia to the table and I’ll Fiji. H.S.: All right. Sweden my cof¬ fee and Denmark my bill. “It is eminently essential,” shouted Mr. Birkinshawski, “that our party should hang together.” “Hang together is right,” from the opposition front bench. “I mean,” splutters our friend, “that we should hang together in accord.” “That’s what I mean,” came again. “And in a mighty strong one, too.” “Time flies.” “You can’t. They go too fast.”